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After almost two months of untimely and unexpected outage, The Pirate Bay (TPB) finally came back this weekend. But the re-launch of the infamous torrent-indexing website raised a question among those suspicious about this new setup — Is it really The Pirate Bay?

A few days back we reported that The Pirate Bay – a widely popular file-sharing website predominantly used to share copyrighted material free of charge – had made its return to the Internet once again after suffering two months of outage following a police raid in Sweden late last year.

Many users, including I, thought the site left dead as last took down was the longest outage the torrenting site has ever experienced. But history repeats and The Pirate Bay made its way a day before it claimed. Pirate lovers around the world rejoiced while others noticed something very suspicious.

IS THE FBI RUNNING THE PIRATE BAY ?

The truth behind The Pirate Bay, like who was driving the re-emergence of the site or who would be currently running the site, is all not known.

But because it was seized and took down the law enforcement, The Pirate Bay could now be in the hands of the FBI, and brought back online as a "honeypot", or fake site meant to collect evidence about users, including pirated content uploaders.

This is what some Reddit and Twitter users thought about the re-launch of the torrent download site. The comments on Reddit and a tweet by an Anonymous sect called The Anonymous Message also points to a federal honeypot masquerading as The Pirate Bay to catch pirates.

WHAT POINTS TO FBI ?

"ALERT: STAY AWAY from The Pirate Bay website as we-have gotten reports That It has-been Indirectly Seized by the FBI and is logging IPs," The Anonymous Message tweeted Sunday, but didn't provide any proof of the FBI involvement in The Pirate Bay.

However, the major concern people thought to have is The Pirate Bay’s use of CloudFlare’s CDN (Content Delivery Network) and its SSL service. CloudFlare is a content delivery network that is used by websites with high amounts of traffic in order to protect sites from DDoS attacks and was discovered on the new Pirate Bay upon its return.

Several people voiced concerns that The Pirate Bay, CDN Cloudflare uses in the United States and therefore speculated about a connection to the FBI.

To add more confusion, and create conspiracy, the admin also noted that he had fired all the moderators working for the site, reported Torrentfreak. "Due to severe security issues regarding the old moderator team all moderation has temporarily been disabled," the admin wrote.

THE PIRATE BAY RESPONDED – TPB IS REAL

Today, The Pirate Bay has responded to the concerns about its use of U.S.-based CDN service CloudFlare, explaining that it’s only using Cloudflare temporarily in order to cope with the continued stream of millions of visitors.

"We have seen that there has been some question to why we are using Cloudflare," TPB says in a statement. "This is only initially to handle the massive load upon the servers. It will be removed shortly."

The second concern was the lack of moderation on TPB. As soon as The Pirate Bay returned, many fake torrents have been posted to the site and without moderators these were not removed. However, TPB operators now explain that the decision to keep the staff out was taken as a security measure.

In order to deal with the spam and fake torrent problem TPB added a report link to every torrent details page. "Before we sort everything out we have instead added a 'Report link' to all torrents which you can find in the details page," the admin wrote. "We believe that the TPB community can help moderate the site for the time being."

The Pirate Bay — an infamous Torrent website predominantly used to share copyrighted material free of charge — could be relaunched on 1st February, the date the website has long been expected to return.

The website went dark from the Internet following a raid in Sweden last month. After a complaint was filed by a group called the Rights Alliance, Swedish Police officers raided The Pirate Bay's server room in Stockholm and seized several servers and other equipment.

Last month’s raid comes almost a month after the arrest of Fredrik Neij, the third and final founder of The Pirate Bay, at the border between Laos and Thailand on November 3. He was convicted by Swedish courts for sharing copyrighted material more than five years ago.

The Pirate Bay homepage is displaying a logo of Phoenix once again with a timer counting down to 1 February. The search box and categories are back under the flag, but are not active yet. At the bottom of the page, a pirate ship sails toward an island, which suggests that the website will soon rise from its ashes.

The Phoenix bird logo was last used by The Pirate Bay (TPB) website in 2006 when the website was raided and taken down by the police. However, TPB reappeared online just after three days — Thanks to a backup made by Fredrik Neij at the last minute.

The Pirate Bay has previously been shut down number of times and had its domain seized, prompting the BitTorrent site to change its top level domain many times. Back in September, The Pirate Bay claimed that it ran the notorious website on 21 "raid-proof" virtual machines, which means if one location is raided by the police, the site would hardly took few hours to get back in action.

The Pirate Bay is one of the most-visited websites of the Internet, and the entertainment industries, including film, music and software industries, blame the website for losses running into billions of pounds.

Though, a number of clones and rumors of rebirths of the infamous The Pirate Bay (TPB) appeared online, but the official domain of The Pirate Bay (i.e. ThePirateBay.se) remained inaccessible.

Since December last year, the domain has been updated several times. If up on 1st February, The Pirate Bay will provide a magnet link for the controversial film The Interview by Sony Pictures. As, for few days the waving pirate flag of the website was overlaid with an image of Kim Jong Un in a cartoon format.

The countdown timer that is still running indicates that The Pirate Bay will relaunch in full fame within a week, although officially there is no such announcement has been made by the collectives who apparently run The Pirate Bay.

If The Pirate Bay comes back, it will definitely come with a Bang. Be ready as the clock is running Tick-Tock-Tick-Tock…...

Surprisingly, from yesterday a cartoon picture of the supreme leader of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (North Korea) named Kim Jong-un appearing on The Pirate Bay website’s homepage, but WHY?

At the beginning of this month, The Pirate Bay — an infamous Torrent website predominantly used to share copyrighted material such as films, TV shows and music files, free of charge — went dark from the internet during a raid operation carried out by Swedish Police.

However, a number of clones and rumors of rebirths of the infamous The Pirate Bay (TPB) appeared online, but the official domain of The Pirate Bay (ThePirateBay.se) remained inaccessible, until last week.

ThePirateBay.se, the official domain of TPB returned to life, but without an archive of torrent files and now showing a ticking clock, with the Jolly Roger (skull and crossbones Pirate flag) waving in the background, and an image with apparently random characters with the filename AES.png, hinting it might be an encryption key and the website is also showing a cartoon sketch of the dictator of reclusive North Korean regime – Kim Jong Un.

Last week when the official domain came back online, it showed a pirate boat with multiple reptile heads, likely refer to a Hydra — a Greek mythological figure that grew two heads for every head that was cut off.

This image was included in the source code, with the hint "sneakyhint", which could be a hint that the website is going to make or allow people to create their own Pirate Bay clone under "The Open Bay" project.

The Open Bay is an initiative launched by Isohunt.to, which allows people to run a "copy" of The Pirate Bay. As earlier the TPB crew said that it would create as many clones as possible, so that The Pirate Bay will never ever went dark.

"We've always lived by Kopimi. We love being cloned. It would be amazing if, like in the classic movie Spartacus, everyone could stand up and say 'I am The Pirate Bay'," The Pirate Bay’s Mr 10100100000 told TF earlier.

Since it appeared that the image of Kim Jong un was included in the TPB homepage due to all the controversies about The Interview — the Seth Rogen and James Franco-starring comedy centered around a TV host and his producer assassinating North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un, and surrounding claims that North Korea was behind the hacking of Sony Pictures' corporate network.

At the time, it is unclear that why the “sneakyhint” image of hydra was replaced with Kim Jong Un by Pirate Bay crew. However, a group of Albanian hackers claimed that they managed to hacked the website and added Kim Jong Un image on the TPB’s homepage. But I doubt, because if TPB would have been hacked by hackers then they would have definitely defaced whole website by having access to the site, not just the replacement of a single image.

Kim Jong Un image on The Pirate Bay homepage started a discussion on the online portal Reddit, where users guessing their best.

"Anyone notice kim jong un? it could be hinting that they are moving servers to north Korea possibly?," one reddit user said.

But, I felt that if The Pirate Bay team is actually hinting all of us that they are moving their servers to North Korea, then it could create a huge dramatic situation between the US and North Korea after the massive Sony Pictures hack.

The Pirate Bay has fought many legal battles since its launch in 2003 to keep the website operational for the last 13 years.

However, this time The Pirate Bay is suffering a major blow after the Swedish Court ruled Thursday that it will take away the domain names 'ThePirateBay.se' and 'PirateBay.se' of the world's most popular torrent website and will hand over them to the state.

As its name suggests, The Pirate Bay is one of the most popular file-sharing torrent site predominantly used for downloading pirated or copyrighted media and programs free of charge.

Despite the criminal convictions, the torrent site remains functioning although it has moved to different Web domains several times.

However, this time, The Pirate Bay loses its main .SE domain, the world's 225th most popular website according to the Alexa ranking, according to Swedish newspaper DN.

"In common with the District Court ruling the Court of Appeal finds that there is a basis for confiscation since the domain names assisted crimes under the Copyright Act," a statement on the site of the Svea Court of Appeal reads. "This means that the right to the domain names falls to the state."

Back in 2013, the anti-piracy prosecutor Fredrik Ingblad took a different approach to shutting down the file-sharing website.

Instead of suing the operators of the site or going after The Pirate Bay directly, the prosecutor decided to take two of its more popular domains from it and filed a complaint against Punkt SE (IIS), the company that manages .SE domain names.

The lawsuit filed against Punkt SE claimed that The Pirate Bay was an illegal torrent site and that all tools, including the domain names thepiratebay.se and piratebay.se, used in connection with the illegal site should be suspended.

Last year, the Stockholm District Court ruled in favor of the prosecution, saying that both ThePirateBay.se and PirateBay.se would be taken from the owners of The Pirate Bay.

Punkt SE then appealed and won the case and also awarded the body compensation of US$40,000 for legal costs.

A wave of excitement in The Pirate Bay lovers. After almost two months of untimely and unexpected outage, the infamous torrent-indexing website The Pirate Bay (TPB) made a defiant return on Saturday.

The Pirate Bay — a widely popular file-sharing website predominantly used to share copyrighted material free of charge — went dark from the Internet following a raid in Sweden late last year. In response to a complaint from Swedish anti-piracy group Rights Alliance, the police raided The Pirate Bay's server room in Stockholm and seized several servers and other equipment.

Though, its almost impossible to keep The Pirate Bay offline for too long, last took down was the longest outage the torrenting site has ever experienced. The site is back one day early based on the countdown timer that was running on the official domain of TPB, i.e. thepiratebay.se.

Anyone visiting thepiratebay.se domain today will be welcomed with a functioning site. People are already uploading and downloading torrents once again, and the site is working almost exactly as it did before went the outage. It looks like the police seizure didn't result in much data loss.

"The Pirate Bay was started by the swedish anti copyright organization Piratbyrån in the late 2003, but in October 2004 it separated became run by dedicated individuals," reads an updated About page on The Pirate Bay.

"In 2006 the site changed it's ownership yet again. Today the site is run by an organisation rather than individuals, though as a non-profit. The organisation is registered in the Seychelles and can be contacted using the contact form."

The Pirate Bay is one of the most-visited websites of the Internet, and the entertainment industries, including film, music and software, blame the website for losses running into billions of pounds.

Last raid comes almost a month after the arrest of Fredrik Neij, the third and final founder of The Pirate Bay, at the border between Laos and Thailand on November 3. He was convicted by Swedish courts for sharing copyrighted material more than five years ago.

It's still unclear how the site has managed to reappear after the raid, but The Pirate Bay claimed last year that it ran the notorious website on 21 "raid-proof" virtual machines, which means if one location is raided by the police, the site would hardly took few hours to get back in action.

Yet some rumors are spreading that some TPB staff are not supporting this relaunch because it was supposed to be a "trimmed down version" that doesn’t require former admins and moderators. However, this staff supposedly plans to launch their own version, at a different domain.

"Personally I won't accept this neither will any of the crew that's been active for almost 10-11 years. As an admin and human, I won't stand aside and accept this kind of behavior," said one of The Pirate Bay's former admins, as reported by TorrentFreak."This is the worst scenario that could happen."

It’s not clear whether that is true. However for now, what may end up being good news for users looking to download content is that The Pirate Bay is Back. :)

The world's popular torrent download website, The Pirate Bay, has again been in a new controversy—this time over secretly planting an in-browser cryptocurrency miner on its website that utilizes its visitors' CPU processing power in order to mine digital currencies.

The Pirate Bay is the most popular and most visited file-sharing website predominantly used to share copyrighted material free of charge. The site has usually been in the news for copyright infringement by movie studios, music producers and software creators.

The Pirate Bay has recently been caught generating revenue by secretly utilizing CPU power of its millions of visitors to mine a Bitcoin alternative called Monero without their knowledge.

The modern Internet depends on advertising revenue to survive, which apparently sometimes spoils users' experience. But The Pirate Bay is trying to choose a different approach.

Visitors to the Pirate Bay recently discovered a JavaScript-based cryptocurrency miner from Coin Hive (a service that helps websites monetise through CPU power) on the torrent site. This code makes use of the CPU power from the visitor's computer to mine Monero digital coins.

However, shortly after the issue was first reported by TorrentFreak, The Pirate Bay issued a statement on its website, saying that it tested the miner for just 24 hours to see if the miner could be used as an alternative to generate revenue, allowing it get rid of annoying ads on the torrent website altogether.

"This is only a test. We really want to get rid of all the ads. But we also need enough money to keep the site running," says The Pirate Bay.

"Let us know what you think in the comments. Do you want ads or do you want to give away a few of your CPU cycles every time you visit the site?"

The Pirate Bay also clarified that the miner software should consume only 20 to 30 percent of CPU power and should be restricted to run in only one single tab.

No other further details were revealed by The Pirate Bay, but threads on Reddit suggested that the Pirate Bay users were not happy about the miner, with several users complaining that the website enabled the miner "without explicit knowledge or authorization of users."

Many users had called this idea "dumb," but borrowing website visitors' extra CPU resources to allow sites generate revenue could place an end to the shady advertisements.

But yes, users should be warned of any such miner by the respective website.

The question remains:

Would you allow in-browser cryptocurrency miners instead of annoying ads to help websites generate revenue?

The Pirate Bay — a widely popular file-sharing website predominantly used to share copyrighted material free of charge — is once again in trouble, this time in Europe.

The European Union Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled today that Dutch ISPs can block access to The Pirate Bay, as the Swedish file-hosting website facilitates an "act of communication" by allowing users to post and obtain torrents for pirated films, TV shows and music for free.

Dutch anti-piracy group Stichting Brein (BREIN) in 2009 filed a case against local Internet Service Providers (ISPs) Ziggo and XS4ALL, and in 2012, the District Court of The Hague ruled that the ISPs must block users from accessing The Pirate Bay.

However, Ziggo and XS4ALL, ISPs successfully overturned the decision two years later with the court ruling against BREIN and concluding that the blockade restricted the internet providers entrepreneurial freedoms.

BREIN group then took the same case to the Supreme Court, who eventually referred the case to the European Court of Justice for seeking further clarification and assistance on the technicalities of the issue.

The Court of Justice closely reviewed the whole case and today ruled that The Pirate Bay website can be blocked, as the operators of the site "play an essential role in making those works [torrent links to the pirated content] available," court explains.

The court accepted the fact that the Pirate Bay does not physically host any illegal content on their servers, but it did say the platform, which knowingly allows its users to share, search, and locate copyright-protected works for download, "may constitute an infringement of copyright."

The today’s ruling would not immediately affect the Pirate Bay, as the Dutch Supreme Court will take the final decision about blocking the website in upcoming months.

The final decision may also affect court orders in other countries, including Austria, Italy, Belgium, Finland, and its hometown Sweden, where The Pirate Bay and other torrent websites are already blocked.

Surprisingly, the operators of the Pirate Bay do not seem to be worried about the latest ruling as they believe the "blockades will eventually help users to get around censorship efforts, which are not restricted to TPB," one of the Pirate Bay moderators told the TorrentFreak.

The Pirate Bay is the world's largest torrent tracker site which handles requests from millions of users everyday and is in the top 100 most visited websites on the Internet. Generally, The Pirate Bay is famous for potentially hosting illegal contents on its website.

Despite years of persecution, it continues to disobey copyright laws worldwide. Even both the founders of The Pirate Bay (TPB) file exchange service were arrested by the authorities and are in prison, but their notorious pirated content exchange continues to receive millions of unique visitors daily. That’s really Strange!! But how??

Recently, The Pirate Bay team has revealed how cloud technology made its service’s virtual servers truly secure to avoid police raids and detection.

While it doesn't own any physical servers, The Pirate Bay is working on “virtual machines” through a few commercial cloud hosting services, even without knowing that whom they are dealing with.

According to TorrentFreak report, at present The Pirate Bay has 21 virtual machines (VMs) that are hosted around the globe at different cloud provider.

The cloud technology eliminate the use of any crucial pieces of hardware, thus saved cost, guaranteed better uptime, and made the site more portable, and therefore made the torrent harder to take down.

The Pirate Bay operates using 182 GB of RAM and 94 GPU cores, with total storage capacity of 620 GB, which actually are not used in full.

Out of 21 VMs, eight of the VMs are used to serve web pages, six are dedicated to handling searches, while two VMs currently runs the site’s database and the remaining five virtual machines are used for load balancing, statistics, the proxy site on port 80, torrent storage and for the controller.

Interestingly, the commercial cloud hosting providers have no ideas that The Pirate Bay is using their services, because all traffic goes through the load balancer, which masks the activities of other virtual machines from the cloud providers. This clearly means that none of the IP-addresses of the cloud hosting providers are publicly linked to The Pirate Bay, so that should keep them safe.

While, in case of closure of some of these cloud servers by the police, it is always possible to move VMs to another location in a relatively short duration of time. Just like when back in 2006 in Sweden, police raided The Pirate Bay's hosting company, seizing everything from blank CDs to fax machines and servers, taking down the site. But, it took just three days to return in its normal state.

Since its return over a month ago, The Pirate Bay — the infamous peer-to-peer file sharing website that has provided only the finest in illegal torrents for more than a decade — has suffered a lot to keep the ship afloat. But, now TPB is experiencing yet more downtime.

The Pirate Bay (TPB) torrent search website was down this morning, and users visiting the websites were redirected to the "mobile-friendly" version of its notorious website called The Mobile Bay, but the website wasn't working either. Both the websites displayed identical '403 Forbidden' error messages.

The outage was first spotted by TorrentFreak, which noted that The Pirate Bay has been struggling to keep the website online since it returned late January after going dark from the Internet following a raid in Sweden late last year in which several servers and other equipment were seized by the police in Stockholm.

The actual cause of the latest downtime wasn't clear that whether the torrent site was having some technical issues or whether it was planning to switch hosts. But, according to the report, The Pirate Bay team is facing one of the major obstacles since it was resurrected last month — "getting stable hosting".

The Mobile Bay, launched at the mid of last year, is also owned by The Pirate Bay developers and was previously used to serve its mobile site. The users who try to the visit thepiratebay.se were redirected to themobilebay.org, but it has an invalid SSL (Secure Socket Layer) certificate and also failed to load either at the downtime.

The Pirate Bay is one of the most-visited websites of the Internet, but the notorious website has been shut down a number of times for helping facilitate copyright infringement, as the entertainment industries, including film, music and software, blamed it for losses running into billions of pounds.

It's still unclear how the site has managed to reappear after the raid, but The Pirate Bay claimed last year that it ran the notorious website on 21 "raid-proof" virtual machines, which means if one location is raided by the police, the site would hardly took few hours to get back in action.

Yet some rumors are spreading that some TPB staff are not supporting this relaunch because it was supposed to be a "trimmed down version" that doesn't require former admins and moderators. However, this staff supposedly plans to launch their own version, at a different domain. However, it’s not clear whether that is true.

Update: After some Fun and attempts, The Pirate Bay is available once again. Cheers.

The controversial file-sharing website The Pirate Bay will still be running in Sweden as the District Court of Stockholm on Friday ruled that they be unable to force the internet service providers (ISPs) to block the website from operating.

The Pirate Bay is an infamous Swedish search engine predominantly used worldwide for pirating material, such as software, movies, music files and TV shows, entirely free of charge.

Numerous ISPs around Europe block the Pirate Bay, but the notorious site will not be inaccessible in its home country Sweden, at least for now, according to the local media.

Last year, a lawsuit was filed by Warner Music, Sony Music, Universal Music, Nordisk Film and the Swedish Film Industry in order to force Swedish ISP broadband companies to block the Pirate Bay, claiming them liable for the infringements of its customers.

However, the Broadband companies refused to comply, stating that their only role is to provide their clients with access to the Internet while facilitating the free flow of information.

Sweden – We can't Ban The Pirate Bay

Now, a Stockholm District Court has handed down its decision in favor of ISPs, ruling that Sweden can not make them block the access to the Pirate Bay website, as those broadband companies are not responsible for what their customers do.

"A unanimous district court considers, therefore, that it is not in a position to authorize such a ban as the rights holders want, and, therefore, rejects their requests," presiding Chief Magistrate Anders Dereborg said.

In other words, the ISP networks are not participating in any crimes, according to the court ruling, as they are just the delivery medium.

While it is possible that the group representing the copyright holders could appeal a higher court, in the meantime, the group will still have to pay the ISPs legal costs thus far, which amounts to more than $150,000.

So, before the group appeals a higher authority, this is something it might want to reconsider.

The four co-founders of The Pirate Bay, the world’s most popular torrent website, have been cleared of charges alleging criminal copyright infringement and abuse of electronic communications in a Belgian court.

The Pirate Bay co-founders Gottfrid Svartholm, Fredrik Neij, Peter Sunde and Carl Lundström were acquitted by a Belgian court located in Mechelse after it was found that they could not be held responsible for the file-sharing website after selling it in 2006.

The Pirate Bay’s founders Gottfrid Svartholm and Fredrik Neij, the website representative Peter Sunde and the website investor Carl Lundström were facing criminal charges related to their involvement with the torrenting site that has proven to be an elusive hub for illegal copyrighted content.

The Pirate Bay was Sold to other Investors in 2006

However, the case fell apart when the Pirate Bay’s co-founders said that they were not involved in any activity related to the website after they sold it to Reservella, a Seychelles-based company, in 2006, as reported on Friday.

Providing more details about the case Torrent Freak report, "All four defendants deny having had anything to do with the site since it reported the sale to a Seychelles-based company called Reservella in 2006. That has proven problematic since the period in which the four allegedly committed the crimes details in the Belgian case spans September 2011 and November 2013."

Though the foursome is likely to face criminal charges in other courts of law, the Belgian court victory represented a little of good news for the cyber crew.

Prosecution Agreed to Court Decision

After the verdict was dropped, the complainants, which is the Belgian Entertainment Association, agreed with the court decision. "Technically speaking, we agree with the court," said Olivier Maeterlinck, the Belgian Entertainment Association (BEA) director.

The Pirate Bay, founded in 2003, is one of the most popular file-sharing websites in the world predominantly used to share copyrighted material free of charge. Despite the criminal convictions, the site remains functioning today, although it has moved to different Web domains several times.

It's still unclear how the website managed to reappear every time after shutdown, but The Pirate Bay claimed last year that it ran the notorious website on 21 "raid-proof" virtual machines, which means if the police raid one location, the site would hardly take few hours to get back in action.

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An online "hacktivist" group that calls itself Anonymous has claimed responsibility for hacking into email accounts of Swedish government in response to the seizure of world renowned The Pirate Bay website and server by Swedish police last week.

Apart from Sweden government officials, the Anonymous hacktivist group also claimed to have hacked into the government email accounts of Israel, India, Brazil, Argentina, and Mexico, and revealed their email addresses with passwords in plain-text.

The Anonymous group also left a message at the end of the leak: "Warning: Merry Christmas & a Happy New Year to all!! Bye :*"

The hack was announced by Anonymous group on their official Twitter account. The tweet also shared a link of Pastebin where leaked data has been dumped with the list of the emails. The tweet reads:

"BREAKING: Emails from Swedish government were hacked in retaliation for the seizure of servers of The Pirate Bay http://pastebin.com/cxmiUSJD" (pastebin removed at the time of writing).

Last Tuesday, an infamous Torrent website predominantly used to share copyrighted material such as films, TV shows and music files, free of charge — The Pirate Bay went dark from the internet for almost half a day after Swedish Police raided the site's server room in Stockholm and seized several servers and other equipment.

The piracy site remained unavailable for several hours, and appeared back online in the late hours with a new URL hosted under the top-level domain for Costa Rica (.cr). However, some torrent users said that the downloads were neither properly working, nor were free of charge, some said that The Pirate Bay service with .cr domain came by a different group, while others referred to it as a scam.

At the moment it is unclear how the group got access to the login credentials of several countries government officials and which server they exactly belong. However, this is not first time, Swedish internet giant Telia was attacked on December 12 following The Pirate Bay raid, reported by The Local.

At the time, the online services by Telia were affected as well as user connections were disturbed, RT reported. Also a chief security researcher from Kaspersky Lab, David Jacoby, said the attack on Telia was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and was likely a response to the seizer of The Pirate Bay in Stockholm by Swedish police. The company also encountered cyber attacks on both December 9 and 10 as well.

However, The Pirate Bay has previously been shut down number of times and had its domain seized, prompting the BitTorrent site to change its top level domain many times.

Earlier in September, The Pirate Bay claimed that it ran the notorious website on 21 "raid-proof" virtual machines, which means if one location is raided by the police, the site would hardly took few hours to get back in action.

Fredrik Neij, the third and the last founder of the infamous file-sharing website The Pirate Bay, was released on Monday from a Swedish prison.

Neij, who goes by the online moniker "TiAMO", was arrested by Thai immigration authorities at the end of November 2014 while he was trying to cross the border illegally from Laos to Thailand and then extradited to a prison in Skänninge, Sweden.

Fredrik Neij is Now a FREE Man

However, after his ten-month prison sentence, Neij is now a free man and has already reunited with family and friends, TorrentFreakreports.

The 37-year-old fugitive Swede man was first convicted of aiding copyright infringements by a Swedish court in 2009 and escaped arrest by fleeing to Laos.

However, Neji's passport was revoked in 2012, and then after two years in November 2014, he was arrested under an Interpol warrant near the Laotian border after four years on the run.

Before his arrest, Neji was living and hosting a file-sharing website called BayFiles, which was shut down afterwards.

All four co-founders of The Pirate Bay have now served prison sentences. The first Founder Gottfird Svartholm, who used the online alias "Anakata", was convicted on both copyright and computer hacking charges by a Danish court and is imprisoned, serving a three-and-a-half year sentence.

The Pirate Bay does not need its Founders to be Functional

The Pirate Bay is a widely popular file-sharing website predominantly used to share copyrighted material free of charge, and despite the criminal convictions, the site remains functioning today, although it has moved to different Web domains several times.

It's still unclear how the website managed to reappear every time after shutdown, but The Pirate Bay claimed last year that it ran the notorious website on 21 "raid-proof" virtual machines, which means if the police raid one location, the site would hardly take few hours to get back in action.

Neij is expected to return now to his house in Laos where he previously lived with his wife and children. TorrentFreak posted a picture of Neij "enjoying his freedom" with a beer cane in one hand. He is the last founder of The Pirate Bay to be released from prison.

The Pirate Bay — an infamous Torrent website predominantly used to share copyrighted material such as films, TV shows and music files, free of charge — went dark from the internet on Tuesday after Swedish Police raided the site's server room in Stockholm and seized several servers and other equipment.

The piracy site knocked offline worldwide on Tuesday morning and remained unavailable for several hours, but the site appeared back online in the late hours with a new URL hosted under the top-level domain for Costa Rica.

Paul Pintér, national coordinator for IP enforcement for the Swedish police, issued only a brief statement on Tuesday, saying that the operation was "a crackdown on a server room in Greater Stockholm" that was "in connection with violations of copyright law."

The raid was also confirmed by Fredrik Ingblad, a prosecutor who specializes in file-sharing cases on behalf of the Swedish government, although he would not share further details or even confirm that The Pirate Bay was the target.

"There were a number of police officers and digital forensics experts there," Ingbland told Sveriges Radio (SR), the local media. "This took place during the morning and continued until this afternoon. Several servers and computers were seized, but I cannot say exactly how many. I can't say exactly what the crime is yet."

However, this is not first time when the site went dark, The Pirate Bay has previously been shut down number of times and had its domain seized, prompting the BitTorrent site to change its top level domain many times. Back in September, The Pirate Bay claimed that it ran the notorious website on 21 "raid-proof" virtual machines, which means if one location is raided by the police, the site would hardly took few hours to get back in action.

The raid comes almost a month after the arrest of Fredrik Neij, the third and final founder of The Pirate Bay, at the border between Laos and Thailand on November 3. He was convicted by Swedish courts for sharing copyrighted material more than five years ago.

Not just The Pirate Bay, the torrent portal's forum, Suprbay.org, image-hosting website Bayimg.com, and text-hosting website Pastebay.net, along with a number of other torrent-related sites including EZTV, Zoink, Torrage and the Istole tracker, have also been knocked offline in this most recent crackdown on the sharing of copyrighted material.

It has also been reported that at least one man may have been detained by police in connection with this Tuesday's raid, according to file-sharing news site TorrentFreak. But, Fredrik Ingland did not confirm or deny that one person had been detained.

Since its launch in 2003, The Pirate Bay (TPB) becomes the world's largest torrent tracker site which handles requests from millions of users everyday and is in the top 100 most visited websites on the Internet. Generally, it is infamous for potentially hosting illegal contents on its website.

One of the founders of notorious file-sharing website The Pirate Bay has been ordered to pay a fine worth nearly US$400,000 to several major record labels after their content was shared illegally via the platform.

The penalty has been imposed on The Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde by a court in Helsinki, Finland.

Interestingly, Sunde, who already left the notorious file sharing site in 2009, said on Twitter that he lost the court case he did not even know about.

The court case was brought by the Finnish divisions of Sony Music, Universal Music, Warner Music and EMI, accusing the Pirate Bay of illegally sharing the music of 60 of their artists through its service.

The artists mentioned in the brief included "Juha Tapio, Teräsniska, Chisu, Deniece Williams, Suvi Vesa-Matti Loiri, Michael Monroe, Anna Abreau, Antti Tuisku, and Children of Bodom," according to the local outlet Digitoday.

However, the recording division did not accuse Sunde of direct infringement; rather it accused Sunde of his involvement in the Pirate Bay that indirectly made him responsible for infringements.

The Helsinki District Court ordered the 37-year-old to pay $395,000 (350,000 Euros) to the record labels.

"The record companies know that I have not had any part of TPB for ages, still suing," Sunde wrote. "Bullying is the new black."

Sunde did not appear in the court to defend himself, so the Finnish Court handed down a default judgment.

Sunde is now ordered to pay the full amount and costs of nearly $62,000 (55,000 Euros) to the local branch of the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI).

Besides, the judge also threatened a fine of 1 Million Euros if the pirated content continues to be shared through The Pirate Bay website, though it is still not clear that how Sunde is supposed to do anything about the sharing of content on the site since he has no association with the service.

As TorrentFreak notes, Sunde and other co-founders of the Pirate Bay, including Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm, also owes large sums of money to other copyright holders as a result of various court judgments over the years.

However, so far, none of those penalties have been "satisfied," and it is likely that this penalty will also go unpaid.

HACKERS HAVE EXPLOITED a security vulnerability at the Bittorrent tracking website Pirate Bay, hacked its user database and harvested personal information to send out spam.

Some Pirate Bay users have reported receiving dodgy spam emails claiming to come as official mail from the website. The spammers hardly pushed to make them seem like legitimate emails because they said users can make money from the website. Oh, really?

The dodgy emails were sent to the Bittorrent news website Torrent Freak and Pirate Bay responded to say it hadn't sent any emails out to its users but it hasn't offered a response as to how its database was breached.
"A course has been put together to show you how to use The Pirate Bay to make some serious money. This seriously works," said the spam.

The spam is an obvious fraud but it will be a worry to the chaps at the Pirate Bay because it highlights that the website has a security flaw and its database has been compromised.

Pirate Bay should be worried because its back end has been hacked on several occasions and it's possible that the spammers are exploiting the same vulnerability and personal information they grabbed before.
Last year a group of Argentinean hackers got into The Pirate Bay's website admininistration panel but only to highlight system vulnerabilities. Then only two months later after Pirate Bay said it patched the hole, it was hit by spammers.

One user told Torrent Freak he'd only used the email address he used to sign up to Pirate Bay once, which suggests that the email addresses definitely came from Pirate Bay's hacked database.

Microsoft has decided to block access to The Pirate Bay from Windows Live Messenger. When users try to send an instant message to a friend with a link from The Pirate Bay, Windows Live Messenger displays a warning, saying that the link is "blocked because it was reported as unsafe."

"We block instant messages if they contain malicious or spam URLs based on intelligence algorithms, third-party sources, and/or user complaints. Pirate Bay URLs were flagged by one or more of these and were consequently blocked," Redmond told The Register in an emailed statement.

The Pirate Bay has been a lightning rod of controversy for years now, as copyright holders take aim at the organisation for giving users access to their content. Much of the focus of last year's ill-fated Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) centered on stopping The Pirate Bay and other sites that provide a similar service. Still, The Pirate Bay sails on.

The Pirate Bay acknowledges that it faces a lot of enemies and is using a variety of tricks and tools to fight them off, including, we hear, airborne WiFi drones.

Although Live Messenger's apparent ban will block the standard Pirate Bay URL, users can easily share the link by adding a space or modifying it in other ways.

Two of the three co-founders of The Pirate Bay—Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm Warg—have been ordered by a Finnish court to pay record labels $477,800 in compensation for copyright infringement on the site.

Last year in a similar case, Helsinki District Court in Finland ordered Peter Sunde, the third co-founder of The Pirate Bay, to pay nearly $395,000 (350,000 Euros) in damages to several major record labels, including Sony Music, Universal Music and Warner Music.

However, Sunde did not pay any penalty yet, and instead, he later announced his plans to sue those record labels for defamation.

All the three co-founders of The Pirate Bay were facing criminal copyright infringement and abuse of electronic communications charges in a Belgian court but were acquitted after it was found that they sold The Pirate Bay file-sharing website in 2006.

The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), which represents the world's major labels, with support from Finnish Copyright Information and Anti-Piracy Center (CIAPC), filed a lawsuit in November 2011 in the Helsinki District Court against The Pirate Bay.

In these last six years, Fredrik Neij and Gottfrid Svartholm never appeared in the court, neither they appointed someone to represent their defence, which eventually led the decision in favour of IFPI record labels.

Besides ordering both the founders to jointly pay compensation of 405,000 euros (over $477,800) to record labels, the District Court also ordered them to "cease-and-desist" the illegal operations of The Pirate Bay, TorrentFreak reported.

However, it is still unclear how Neij and Svartholm are supposed to do anything about stop sharing of content on the site since they have no association with The Pirate Bay.

It has also been reported that Neij, Svartholm, and Sunde also owes large sums of money to other copyright holders as a result of various court judgments over the past few years.

However, so far, none of those court penalties has been "satisfied," neither Sunde paid the fines imposed on him last year, and it is likely that this penalty will also go unpaid.

Few days back we reported that, One of the world's largest BitTorrent sites "The Pirate Bay" is going to put servers on GPS-controlled aircraft drones in order to evade authorities who are looking to shut the site down.

Most of the people from World didn't take it serious, well but The Pirate Bay is apparently deadly serious about investing in drone servers that it will fly in international airspace to make it incredibly difficult for governments to stop its expansion.

A blog posting on the Pirate Bay site said the service had gone offline for a few hours on 18th March to move its front machines (which redirect a user’s traffic to a masked location). “We have now decided to try to build something extraordinary,” it said.

If actually happening, it is part of a wider move to stay several steps ahead of the law, with The Pirate Bay gleefully thumbing its nose at the legislative attempts to bring it down. While a number of users are relying on VPNs (virtual private networks) to mask what they are doing online, some services are offering something similar, but on a mass scale.

Here’s the full announcement.

“Political power in Athens, Greece, today signed an agreement with representatives for The Pirate Bay (TPB) about exclusive usage of the greek airspace at 8000-9000ft.

- This might come as a shock for many but we believe that we need to both raise money to pay our debts as well as encourage creativity in new technology. Greece wants to become a leader in LOSS, says Lucas Papadams, the new and crisply elected Prime Minister of Greece.

LOSS that he is referring to is not the state of finances in the country but rather Low Orbit Server Stations, a new technology recently invented by TPB. Being a leader for a long time in other types of LOSS, TPB has been working hard on making LOSS a viable solution for achieving 100% uptime for their services.

- Greece is one of few countries that understands the value of LOSSes. We have been talking to them ever since we came up with the solution seeing that we have equal needs of being able to find financially sustainable solutions for our projects, says Win B. Stones, head of R&D at TPB.

The agreement gives TPB a 5 year license to use and re-distribute usage of the airspace at 8000-9000 ft as well as unlimited usage of the radio space between 2350 to 24150 MHz. Due to the financial situation of both parties TPB will pay the costs with digital goods, sorely needed by the citizens of Greece.”

The sign off in the Pirate Bay blog – “when time comes we will host in all parts of the galaxy, being true to our slogan of being the galaxy's most resilient system” appears intentionally hyperbolic.

The 38-year-old rapper Kanye West is at the centre of controversy once again.

West is himself a Pirate Lover just like everyone else, and he proved it today by sharing a photo of his laptop screen on Twitter.

The rapper tweeted an ill-judged picture on Tuesday night to show what he was listening to on YouTube (Sufjan Stevens’ 'Death With Dignity' song), but his fans discovered something he would have hide if realized before sharing that snap.

Taking a closer look at the address bar was quite revealing, showing two very interesting tabs:

The notorious file-sharing website The Pirate Bay

MediaDownloader

Pirate Bay Offers Tech Support to Kanye West

West’s recent album The Life of Pablo was involved in a piracy concern. He was so outraged when he saw his recent album was being pirated by 500,000 downloads in just two days that he considered taking legal action against The Pirate Bay.

However, in a recent tweet West accidentally revealed his own pirate habits.

It looks like the controversial rapper was torrenting a pirated copy of Xfer Records synthesizer software Serum on The Pirate Bay. The serum is a popular WaveTable editor that costs just $189 for a license.

However, despite having harsh feelings, the Pirate Bay team said it was happy to provide West with tech support.

DJ Deadmau5, co-founder of Xfer Records, called out West as a dick and later he showed some sympathy for West, calling for a Kickstarter campaign to raise fund to help West afford a copy of Serum.